Intellectual and religious reaction to the French Revolution

The upheaval of the French Revolution destroyed many academic and ecclesiastical organisations belonging to the old order, but a reaction was not slow in coming. As Sainte-Beuve noticed in 1854, the number of Le Moniteur for Easter Sunday 1802, which published news of the Peace of Amiens and of the Concordat between Napoleon and the Pope, also published a review of a recent book: Le Génie du Christianisme, by Chateaubriand (1768–1848). An appeal to tradition against the excesses that had followed from rationalism found romantic expression in Chateaubriand's book, but the concept of tradition was to receive a more philosophical cast from others – De Maistre (1763–1852), De Bonald (1754–1840), and Lamennais (1782–1854). All three had idiosyncratic views on the role of language, and the opposition they provoked influenced the form taken by the revival of scholasticism. Writing in 1809, De Maistre claimed that the content of language depends upon the life and customs of those who use it; it eludes arbitrary enactments; it was not invented by men, nor can its diversity be attributed to human means. For De Bonald, the disagreements of philosophers oblige us to seek for moral science what physical sciences have already: a fixed point, a criterion of truth, something that will be public, readily accessible, and evident. He believed this to be ‘the primordial and indispensable gift of language, bestowed upon the human race’. Reason and experience in individuals need the setting and tradition of society, and of the language it hands on, to reach truths that go beyond particular facts.